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Bane

Linking this on Twitter catalyzed a far more animated discussion than I had anticipated. Fundamental question: Is Bane NRx?

Outside in has no settled position on this (yet), and hadn’t expected to need one. A tentative proposal though: The League of Shadows is so radically neoreactionary it doesn’t relate to the Left as a political option, but solely as a mindless pathogen — as germ warfare to be guided against a decaying social order. That militant leftist activism will produce nothing but ruin is an assumption held so firmly it doesn’t require explicit acknowledgement — and the movie audience has to tacitly identify with this analysis for Bane’s strategy to make any sense. The Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.

To try to work something like that outside a movie, it would really be necessary to be the functional equivalent of the League of Shadows (manipulating mainstream politics dexterously, from above, or beyond). It’s probably agreed that NRx isn’t there yet … unless what we see hides something else.

ADDED: In the Twitter chat, it has pointed out that my understanding of the background story is profoundly confused (especially regarding Bane’s troubled relationship with the League of Shadows). Hopefully, by the time people have finished with me in the ensuing comments thread, I’ll have been properly schooled. This (suggested by @CineRobert) might help.

Whatever you want, capitalism is the most reliable way to get it, and by absorbing every source of social dynamism, capitalism makes growth, change and even time itself into integral components of its endless gathering tide. […] This is the new world Transcendental Miserabilism haunts as a dyspeptic ghost.

I seriously think we need DEC as Bane, and NRx as Batman – the way home.

That’s just how I’m differentiating the work. DEC is realizing somethings wrong on your way to realizing it’s all shit.

NRx offers something other than another and utterly unnecessary Dark Age.

These are engineered crises, not natural or mistakes piling up. Policies are piling up. This is malice. This is revenge for crimes against Old World Tribe or long defeated and dead ghosts. The Left is merely the vehicle, the motive is MALICE, the method is HARM and it reaps PROFIT.

Oh and whether it’s Bane or Dark Knight doesn’t matter so much as The First Duty to Destroy.

Let’s take a look at the cost of Failure and of “enjoying the decline”. In Argentina, our most likely model because of course it’s the same people executing the same plan.

“The teacher looked at us. “This is us”

“It’s the collapsed country, a country that turns into 3rd world country like in pyramid five where there is almost no middle class to speak, one huge low, poor class , and a very small, very rich, top class.”

“What are those arrows that go from the middle to the bottom of the pyramid?” Someone asked.

“The way kidnapping just popped out of nowhere it astonishing to say the least. One day kidnapping for money is almost unheard of, and within a couple of months, after the economical collapse, everyone starts getting kidnapped. The news report of about 3 or 5, sometimes even 10 kidnaps in one day in Buenos Aires city. ”

Counter Currents had an Alt Right take on “Dark Knight Rises” (you can access the article by clicking my name) that touches on this theme of Leftism/Demotism being weaponized by its enemies:

Thus, Bane’s proto-Occupy speeches aren’t about propagating the ideology of the League – it’s spiritual poison. He even tells us it’s spiritual poison. His screed about giving Gotham back to the people is done to mock the idealism that Batman places in the populace of the city itself. Bane’s actions are an attempt to fulfill H. L. Mencken’s quip that, “The people get the government they deserve, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”

When left to their own devices, the people of Gotham fail miserably at governing themselves. Without the force of Gotham Police Department, the judicial fangs of the Dent Act, or the confining grip of Arkham Asylum, Gotham quickly falls into disarray. The people of Gotham illustrate that they are nothing more than a mob, who allow psychopaths like Dr. Crane/The Scarecrow judicial power to give people death sentences for pointless reasons. Bane is Gotham’s reckoning, not Gotham’s executioner. Only the people of Gotham can be the architects of their own destruction.

The only thing I find apealing about reactionary sentiment about modernity is its loathing of popular culture and cybernatization of interpersonal comunication like twitter. The fact that self-proclaimed reactionaries embrace these things makes me that much more sceptical of the whole movement. Fuck the Nolan movies let’s read the classics, fuck the twitter let’s read multi- voluminou works of church fathers. If there is a degeneration in modernity, it is in the things the neoreactionaries do not chalenge.

After giving Twatter a shot for a couple of weeks, I am inclined to agree. I do not really understand why neoreactionaries are embracing it as a platform (I have a few theories, though). If it’s all the came crowd, then isn’t a good old bulletin board going to serve as a better echo chamber? Twitter is interesting as a phenomenon – as a sign of the times, and certainly worthy of closer examination. But it is a rather inane format for developing intellectual ideas worthy of any deeper consideration. Exaggerated compression of ideas is interesting, but ultimately fruitless. I think there is a sort of emperor’s new clothes thing going on going on here actually; there seems to be a supposition that the format increases the ideological bandwidth, but I don’t really think that it does. It changes the nature of the discourse, and not for the better as far as my impressions go. Deeper discussions would reveal fundamental flaws – or at least very different perspectives and aspects, which are lost in compression – in many of the ideas that are expressed, but there is a silent agreement (or is there?) to not mention this and to pretend that such is not the case.
I suppose this mini-rant could just as well have been posted on the ‘Speckle’ post, but I guess it makes sense here as well.

Ra’s al Ghul certainly is a neoreactionary character, and so is Bruce Wayne; both are struggling toward a similar end, sparked by personal loss, but they approach it with contrasting means, and the first movie represents the struggle between these contending views. As much as I like Ghul as a character, his reactionary ideology isn’t sufficient cause to hold him as an image of yours. After all, does anyone dispute that Islamic terrorists are extreme reactionaries? There’s already been some literature discussing the parallels between Ghul and terrorists (the Central Asian locale of his first appearance should be a satisfactory hint for a traveler to Xinjiang), so I won’t retread those waters here, but if the left is destructive and so is terrorist reaction then what is the functional difference? And here we get to Bane, who was excommunicated from the League of Shadows by its one member we know to be reactionary. Bane may be employing socialist rhetoric in the aims of reactionary, terrorist destruction, but if so what’s the difference between that and actual anomic leftism? Everyone knows that Stalin was nothing more than a realist opportunist, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution was nothing but intentional systematic chaos similar to that provoked by Bane; like Alfred says in regards to Bane, “some men just want to watch the world burn”. Batman may be more idealist but is no fan of populism either — think about it, is he afraid of “bat” or of “man,” after all his parents were “gunned down by the very people they were trying to save”. His remedy for chaos provides a more palatable formula; order, stability, police power, rule of law, meritocracy, natural hierarchy, noble values, heroes and myths, etc. These things don’t assume that people are good, but create the circumstances under which people can be constrained and society can be preserved.

The terrorism, nihilism, and socialism represented by the three villains of the series, respectively, don’t only contend with reaction but divert it as well. Each film, though admittedly the third handles this poorly in comparison with the first two, demonstrates Batman’s struggle not only against them, but against becoming them because there are only fine lines between them. Batman’s approach may not necessarily be neoreaction, and I’m not sure I even like it, but it does work. I’m a nihilist myself, that’s how I was brought here and what led me to the accept the veracity of many DE claims, but even I only think the League of Shadows is cool as part of a movie.

Stalin and Lenin were both Communist ultra-leftists. They were opportunistic and even dishonest about a lot of things, but their overall policy and much of their ghostwritten rhetoric is clearly written by someone of the genuine left, as obscurantist and outright ghoulish as the position of the party certainly was it was not (largely) cynical.

MM’s association of Right with Order and Left with Chaos works pretty well as a litmus test. The Gotham of Batman Begins was already immensely Leftist, chaotic and corrupt so even the League of Shadows appears Right by comparison. The Batman is further Right though.

[…] it, to make it as close to fatal as possible for our friends in the Cathedral. Over the weekend, Nick Land wrote that “…[the] Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.” If it can be […]

[…] it, to make it as close to fatal as possible for our friends in the Cathedral. Over the weekend, Nick Land wrote that “…[the] Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.” If it can be […]